Practices

Nobody is asking you to want less of a lift. The ask is to take some of it from somewhere that does not leave you flat afterwards.

Put that way most people will engage, because it is not a demand to become a calmer sort of person. Cold water, music that actually moves you,…

A young person on the sofa with their phone looks like nothing is happening. From the inside it is often the first hour all day that has asked nothing of them.

Both readings are true, and the argument is usually about which one gets said out loud. Naming the second one to a parent takes a surprising amount…

Who pays the bill does give a household some say. That argument weakens every year a child gets older, and it runs out entirely once they are an adult sitting in front of you asking for help.

With a sixteen year old at home on the family plan, parents setting terms is reasonable and worth saying out loud. With an adult, the same move…

Screens are easy to start and have no natural end. So the part worth planning is not the getting on, it is the getting off.

Decide in advance what happens at the finish, and make sure something appealing is waiting on the other side. A timer that only tells you to stop…

What you are on there for matters more than how long you are on. Scrolling to keep up with people you love is a different activity from posting and then watching to see who approved.

Use aimed at status, at likes, at managing how you come across tends to sit alongside feeling worse. Use aimed at staying in touch and sharing what…

Online you can draft, delete, reply an hour later or simply leave. None of that exists in a kitchen, and plenty of people now find real conversation unbearably fast.

So the ordinary friction of talking to someone in person, the pause you fill badly, the thing that comes out wrong, gets read as proof that you are…

Spend long enough in comment sections and cruelty starts to look like the normal way people speak. It is not. You are reading a very odd sample.

Rudeness online is loud, cheap and rewarded, so it fills the space out of all proportion to how common it is. The trouble is that we generalise.…

Most children with ADHD grow into adults with ADHD. Some of it settles as the brain finishes developing into your late twenties, and adult life gives you more say over how your days are arranged, but the underlying difficulty tends to stay.

This is worth knowing because much of the improvement people do get comes from arranging things to suit themselves: the job that fits, the hours that…

It tends to run the same way each time. You struggle with something, you feel awful about it, so you keep away from it, and anyone who raises it gets a sharp answer, which makes you keep away harder.

The relief when you avoid it arrives instantly, which is exactly why the loop tightens. Meanwhile the pile of unopened post has not moved, so next…

The goal was never to enjoy the dull task. It is to arrive at something more like: I hate this and I can still do it well enough.

Both halves are doing work. Moving towards the thing you dislike, rather than away from it, is what loosens the avoidance. And well enough is what…

It rarely stays a matter of attention. The difficulties shape what you come to believe about yourself, that colours how you are with the people closest to you, and their responses feed straight back into the original trouble.

Discouraging to read, and genuinely useful, because it means there are three places to work and they are not equally stuck. The wiring is the hardest…

There is a difference between having ADHD and being ADHD. It sounds like word games until you notice which one you are living in.

Being it means the condition runs everything and explains everything, and there is a quiet relief in that which is hard to give up. Having it means…

Work properly at the parts that can be managed, then be at peace with what is left over. The order matters more than it sounds.

Peace offered before any real effort is giving up with better vocabulary, and it never quite convinces the person saying it. Effort with no end point…

Every list, timer and rule exists to buy you a life worth having. If the systems have quietly become the point, something has turned the wrong way round.

It is easy to end up managing your ADHD as a full time occupation and calling that recovery. A better test of a week is whether it held anything you…

For a lot of people with ADHD there are only two times: now, and not now. A deadline on Thursday and one six months out sit in the same box until the day they suddenly become today.

This is worth knowing because it explains why being told the date again does nothing. You knew the date. What was missing was the sense of it coming…

Spotting on day one that a procedure is pointless is a real skill. Saying so in the first meeting is the part that costs people the job.

The observation is rarely the problem. It is that it arrives before anyone asked, from someone who has been there a fortnight, often with the…

Look back over your own history for the times you were knocked down and started something anyway. That pattern is common with ADHD, and it is easy to miss while you are busy counting the failures.

It may be a side effect of not weighting the future heavily. The past does not press down quite as hard either. People who have been sacked, dropped…

Every trait worth having here arrives with its twin. A love of the offbeat and a real problem with deadlines are the same wiring seen from two sides.

Strength lists that leave the cost out are not believable and they do not help anybody. Pair them instead. If you are the one who finds the…

A clever workaround can hide a difficulty for years. A child who memorises what he cannot read looks fine, right up until the amount to be read grows past what memory can carry.

So do not judge by output alone. Ask what it cost to produce. Someone keeping up but exhausted, dreading the reading, staying up late to cover it, is…

Think of your sense of the future as how far out to sea you can spot a ship. How far depends on your eyesight, and also on how big and bright the ship is and what the weather is doing.

That last part is the useful bit. The same person sees a wedding six months off perfectly clearly and misses a form due on Tuesday completely,…